Tuesday 29 January, 2019
7:30-9pm
Proyecto AMIL
Lima
For the third edition of AMIL- Art Sessions, Adriana Ciudad will present Rivers Flow Out of My Eyes*; a talk during which the artist will share the personal process and investigation that led her to develop Allá nos veremos, sin sombra y sin faz, her most recent exhibition at the La Tertulia Museum in the city of Cali, Colombia.
After a personal loss in 2016, Ciudad realized that western thought and science provides few resources to face grief. Looking for alternatives, the artist delved into the Afro-Colombian ritual of the Alabaos: funerary songs from the community of Timbiquí, located on the Pacific coast, in the south of the country.
The Alabaos are sung by women when someone in the community dies. For 9 days during which the soul is supposed to reach the “hereafter”, both the deceased person and the family, are accompanied by constant chanting and prayers. Throughout this process a very powerful catharsis takes place and grieving becomes a collective affair.
Throughout the talk Ciudad will describe the various facets of the project and reflect on the importance of reclaiming South American ancestral beliefs, led by women, that for a long time have been discriminated and relegated to oblivion.
AMIL- Art Sessions is a series of monthly encounters at Proyecto AMIL aimed to expand artistic and curatorial practice beyond the temporal and spatial limitations of exhibition making. Throughout this series Proyecto AMIL seeks to promote alternative ways to talk about and experience contemporary art; as well as create a platform for exchange between artists, curators, researchers and our local audience.
Adriana Ciudad (1980) is a Peruvian-German artist based in Bogotá (Colombia) since 2014. She studied Fine Arts at the University of the Arts in Berlin (UdK), where she graduated with a master’s degree in 2008. Her most recent projects have been exhibited at the La Tertulia Museum (Cali), SACO (Antofagasta), Casa del Lago (Mexico City), Y Gallery (New York) and at NC-arte (Bogotá). She has been awarded with the UNDP Grant (United Nations Development Program) obtained for the Alabaos Project and the DAAD project grant (German Academic Exchange Service). She has done artistic residences in Lugar a dudas, SACO, among others.
*The title of the talk has been taken from an Afro-Colombian funerary verse.
